quinta-feira, 14 de julho de 2016

Trouble in Paradise: Tourism in the Age of Terrorism / DER SPIEGEL

Trouble
in Paradise: Tourism in the Age of Terrorism

Terrorism
is making life difficult for many vacation destinations, with
European travelers choosing holidays closer to home. The travel
industry is fundamentally changing as a result and many once popular
places are facing ruin. By SPIEGEL Staff

He quickly performed
yet another inspection of the surveillance cameras, got an update on
the status of maintenance work being performed on the bomb detector
and went over his calculations on the future strength of his team of
guards for the umpteenth time. Now all security expert Mohab Bakr
needs is his cigarettes, then he'll be ready for his most important
appointment of the day, maybe even of the season: the security
meeting with the managers of the Egypt's seaside resort Taba Heights.
Bakr is in charge of security.

His senior-most
supervisor, "Mister Jokim," will also be at today's
meeting. His real name is Joachim Schmitt, the German vice president
of hotels and resorts for the Orascom Group, which owns Taba Heights.
The international corporation operates 25 locations with nearly
15,000 beds between the Nile and Red Sea, but business has seen
better days. The unrest following Hosni Mubarak's deposition in 2011
along with Islamist terrorism have taken their toll on the
Swiss-based company's share price, which has fallen from 150 Swiss
francs to below 10. "Mister Jokim" has come to Taba to talk
about the security situation -- security, in these trying times, has
become an invaluable commodity.

Bakr, a bulky man in
his early 50s, wears a dark mustache, light linen trousers and a blue
and white plaid shirt. When Bakr makes the rounds inspecting the
resort, he blends right in among the guests. But now he's back in his
office, situated directly above the resort's central laundromat at
the far edge of the complex, talking about how he protects the
tourists.

Bakr's greatest wish
is that visitors feel safe again in Egypt. He wants to see the
French, Swiss and German tourists return to the hotels, the coral
reefs and the deep blue sea.

The area Bakr
oversees is enormous. At 4 million square meters, or 43 million
square feet, is about as big as 616 football fields. Three security
perimeters encircle the resort village, which has its own golf
course, shopping center and clinic. The main road, which continues on
to the Egyptian-Israeli border town of Taba, is secured by military
outposts fortified with machine guns and sandbags. The main entrance
to the resort is guarded by police and Bakr's security team, a force
of around 100 men. The bottom of every approaching vehicle is
inspected with mirrors and sniffed by bomb dogs. The guards make no
exceptions, not even for the Peugeot of "General Mohab," as
they call Bakr.

The name comes from
Bakr's former life, back when he was a brigadier general in the
Egyptian military. As a liaison officer on the Sinai Peninsula, he
maintained contact with the Israelis, multinational troops and the
Palestinians. He has photos of himself sitting at a negotiating table
across from Israeli officers and in the Gaza office of the late
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. He even worked for Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi, back when the now-Egyptian president was still the head of
Egypt's military intelligence.

After three decades
of service as a brigadier general, Bakr retired. "The stress was
too much," he says. His current position, commanding security
guards at Taba Heights, is much more relaxed -- and the pay is better
too. "This new job is a piece of cake," he says.

It's not the kind of
thing you'd expect to hear on the Sinai Peninsula, which is
considered a stronghold of Islamic terrorists and Germany's Foreign
Ministry has officially issued a "partial travel warning"
for all of Egypt. It's the kind of cautionary notice that's read
carefully by German travelers -- like the Koslowski family.

Sylke and Ulrich
Koslowski are nice people. She's a cashier at Lidl, the German
discount supermarket chain, while he works as a machinist. They live
in Warstein, a town that is, geographically speaking, smack in the
middle of Germany. From the balcony of their second-story apartment,
they look out upon the green undulations of the Sauerland, a low
range of hills. The Koslowskis like to go for walks and they love
where they live. Yet the walls of their apartment are decorated with
framed photographs of the many trips they've taken. They've always
loved to travel.

Hungary, Bulgaria,
Mallorca, Italy and Fuerteventura along with city trips to Amsterdam,
London and Brussels. They were in Abu Dhabi and the Maldives. They
wanted to go to Turkey next -- Istanbul perhaps, or to Antalya, where
the prices are tempting for so many Germans. They're worldly people,
interested in new places.

But then came terror
-- and with it, fear.

This year, the
Koslowskis aren't going to Turkey or the Maldives. Instead, they've
chosen Fehmarn, a Baltic Sea island off Germany's northern coast.
Their choice to travel domestically is a common one these days and
Germany's beach resorts are fully booked.

Such travel choices
made by the Koslowskis of this world, totally normal Germans, are
having a profound impact. Due to their anxieties, their fears and
their trip cancellations, hotels in Tunisia are going bankrupt and
Turkey is losing a significant chunk of its usual tourism revenue.

Sylke Koslowski once
visited a mosque in the Maldives, which was very impressive, she
says. But today, she's afraid. She fears a rage she does not
understand. She doesn't want to have the feeling of "being
accepted in these countries just because tourists bring in money"
without actually being welcome.

Vacation was once a
microcosm of globalization, one that was accessible to everyone.
Average Joes, cashiers and machinists alike, would fly in crammed
discount jets via Dubai and Singapore to Phuket, Thailand. The diving
instructor would be from Kuala Lumpur, Muslim and married to a
Buddhist. At night, everyone would drink Dutch beer and eat Thai soup
and ribs with sauerkraut. It was pleasant and comfortable, but it was
not a situation that was built to last. It was delusional to believe
such a comfort zone could be maintained forever, whether people were
paying for it or not. Many such vacation destinations were in
countries where society was in a precarious state of tension,
aggravated by political repression, poverty and hatreds.

But are tourists
really interested in all that? Of course not. Tourists are in search
of simplicity, says crisis and communications expert Peter Höbel,
who advises firms in the travel industry. They want a place where
they are removed from psychological strain, from incomprehensible
anger -- and they want to be loved.

The tsunami in
December 2004, for instance, cost more people their lives than all
terrorist attacks since then. But that was a natural disaster, an act
of God. Terrorism, on the other hand, is the personification of evil.
It undermines our self-image as travelers; we want to be smiled at
and greeted as friends. This illusion is currently being destroyed.

But isn't fear of
terrorist attacks, rationally speaking, completely overblown? From
the sober perspective of statisticians and risk analysts, the answer
is yes. The probability of falling victim to terrorist violence in a
foreign country is extremely low. You're much more likely to get into
a car accident on the way to the airport or suffer a heart attack
inside the terminal because the check-in line is so long.

Risk analysts have
come up with a unit of measurement for death called the micromort. It
measures the probability of dying an unnatural death on a an
otherwise normal day. One micromort is the equivalent of a
one-in-a-million chance that someone will die. A holiday flight, for
example, is relatively safe. You can fly from Düsseldorf to Antalya
and back and only expose yourself to a risk of less than 0.5
micromorts. A Caesarean section, on the other hand, has a statistical
probability of 170 micromorts, while bypass surgery clocks in at
16,000 micromorts.

And when Ulrich
Koslowski rides home from Fehmarn on his Harley-Davidson, a trip that
covers a distance of about 400 kilometers (248.5 miles), he'll hit a
risk factor of 40 micromorts. That's not very high, but it's higher
than was the risk of dying in a terror attack in France in 2015.
Death by terrorism is as likely as death by falling coconut, which
kills 150 people a year. Or by walking backwards off a cliff while
taking a selfie -- a fairly new kind of fatal accident.

But vacation isn't a
probability calculation. It is an emotional journey. And fear breeds
more fear. Tourists are social creatures -- and not many of them
would enjoy the prospect of sitting alone near the hotel buffet,
surrounded by melancholic waiters.

Another factor came
into play as the Koslowskis decided upon Fehmarn. It's an invention
from northern Germany, and it first hit the market this year -- a
beach chair that transforms into a canopy bed where you can spend the
night. At 1.3 meters wide and 2.4 meters long, it can be zipped up
and it has portholes for peeking outside. From the confines of its
walls, you can look up and see the stars and listen to the waves
breaking against the shore.

Arne Schultchen has
a particularly nice way of explaining the success of this beach
basket. He runs a design agency in Hamburg and it was his company
that developed this novelty and the philosophy to go along with it.
The beach chair, Schultchen says, represents shelter and security:
"The beach chair is kind to me, it's reliable -- the opposite of
a terrorist." That's certainly one way to see it. The beach
chair is certainly symbolic of an important trend in tourism. Since
2005, the number of overnight visitors to Germany has jumped 27
percent, and in the last year alone, it rose 2.9 percent to 436
million people.

Fear of terrorism is
dividing the world into winners and losers. Spain, Germany, Greece
and Italy are profiting. In Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, small
family-owned companies and large hotel chains alike are going under.

The year 2016 could
be a decisive one: The winners are experiencing the full power of the
tourism industry, one of the biggest economic sectors on the planet.
In the EU, there are as many people working in tourism as there are
in the auto industry or the agricultural sector.

The losers see
themselves in a war of sorts, one in which today's enemy was
yesterday's friend. Their mode of attack is the fact that they no
longer show up. Unemployed Egyptians, desperate Tunisians -- that's
how new refugees are made, or how legions of young men become
susceptible to the siren song of Islamist preachers.

TURKEY

Side

Hayatli Simsek
enjoyed his work the most when he was traveling with his guests in
the Taurus Mountains, where the women still bake pita bread by hand
and children swim in the turquoise river. For Simsek, a travel guide,
these were special excursions: "I wanted to show them how we
live."

Simsek is a gaunt
50-year-old with a tattoo of a stylized heart on his forearm. He goes
by Hajo -- that's what people used to call him back when he lived in
the southern German city of Heilbronn.

Simsek was born to a
family of guest workers from Anatolia. He played football with the
other boys from his neighborhood, became a stonemason and married in
Germany before having two daughters. Fourteen years ago, his wife
divorced him and Simsek needed a fresh start. So he went to Turkey.
Things weren't so bad -- at first.

Simsek sits under a
pomegranate tree in his yard in Side, a seaside town located about 60
kilometers from Antalya. He looks at the beach bordering his property
and talks about how he built a new life for himself here on the
Turkish Riviera after more than 30 years in Germany. After completing
his tour guide training, he convinced his boss to buy a white
Mercedes bus. He painted colorful waterfalls and cliffs onto the side
and began offering "Mountain safaris" for 20 a ticket.
The bus seats 50 people.

Business was going
well. On some days, he even had to rent a second bus. But now?
Practically every week, a bomb goes off somewhere in the country, or
a terrorist detonates a suicide belt. More than 300 people have died
since June 2015 in nearly two dozen attacks by Islamic State or the
banned Kurdistan Workers Party. On the last Tuesday in June, three
suicide bombers killed 45 people and injured 240 others at Atatürk
Airport in Istanbul. Ankara suspects Islamic State was behind the
attack.

In the first five
months of 2016, the number of foreign visitors to Antalya dropped by
more than 40 percent. Economists worry this could amount to a 7
billion loss in revenue. Along the Turkish Riviera, almost all the
hotels have had to take out loans.

Until recently,
Turkey's travel industry was generating more than 6 percent of the
country's gross domestic product with nearly one in 10 jobs depending
on tourism. The sector, observers say, has sufficient financial
reserves to keep going for a year, two at the most. After that, 30 to
40 percent of the hotels and restaurants will have to close, which
would cost thousands of jobs.

Simsek walks along
the empty beach promenade in Side, past closed hotels and
restaurants. The last time he took guests into the Taurus Mountains
was three weeks ago, he says. "If things continue like this,
I'll be bankrupt in half a year."

Turkey isn't the
only travel destination that has lost its innocence. The world has
become a dangerous place, or so it seems. In 2015 alone, there were
dozens of attacks and numerous kidnappings outside Iraq and Syria for
which Islamic State claimed responsibility. Tourists are especially
"soft targets." Their behaviors and their routes are easily
predictable, they're unsuspecting, sometimes naive and unprotected,
and they don't know their way around. They're the perfect victims.

It's just past 6
p.m. when the black car pulls up. It's a single, modest-looking sedan
without a police escort or cordons or sirens -- which is remarkable,
because Greek politicians tend to be fond of making a grand entrance.
As soon as Elena Kountoura, Greece's minister of tourism, gets out of
the car, people begin approaching her and she joins the event's
organizer to have him explain the set-up. A former model and athlete,
Kountoura is probably Greece's most popular politician.

Tourism is the only
sector in Greece where things are actually doing quite well, and
Kountoura is the ruler of this empire of hotels and beaches,
restaurants, camping sites, bars and souvenir shops. Today she has
come to Nemea, an ancient town on the Peloponnese peninsula where the
Nemean Games are held every four years. The games have their roots in
Greek antiquity and pay tribute to Zeus.

It's a perfect, warm
summer evening and Kountoura is in a good mood. Last year, more than
26 million tourists came to Greece, an increase of 7 percent over
2014. It's an industry of utmost importance for the crisis-ridden
country, employing more than a million Greeks, or one-fifth of all
workers, even if it's mostly seasonal.

Is Greece profiting
from the tourism crisis in the rest of the world?

Kountoura says that
Greece has had its problems too. The arrival of the refugees, she
says, caught the country off guard at first. But, she says, "our
people, this beleaguered nation, responded to the refugee crisis with
humanity, hospitality, generosity and kindness. This was a hugely
important message to the world, that counterweighted the negative
publicity of the refugee crisis."

But things didn't
unfold quite as harmoniously as Kountoura would have it. On Kos, for
example, the island that lay along the migrants' route last year,
there was discontent and unease among many vacationers. People
visiting the island didn't want to be confronted with the sight of
refugees and their suffering during their vacation, and they
certainly didn't want to stroll past them in their bathing suits
along the beach promenade.

Traveling for
pleasure is a relatively new invention. In the past, ordinary people
only traveled when necessary -- unless they were greedy or crazy,
say, an adventurer, merchant, missionary or a man possessed. It
wasn't until the 18th and 19th centuries that literary greats
glorified travel as a romantic experience, a way to discover oneself.
In the 20th century, thanks to flat-rate trips and budget travel
agencies, globe-trotting was democratized and mechanized.

But it wasn't all
innocent. Western tourists tromped through isolated villages,
snapping photos along the way, and women in hotpants sauntered
through Oriental bazaars. Tourists put their money, cameras and way
of life on display, as well as their skin and sexuality.

And now, in the 21st
century? Are we witnessing the end of this lack of inhibition?

TUNISIA

Port el Kantaoui

The Royal Kenz Hotel
in Port El Kantaoui is an ocher-colored building on the beach with
bubbling fountains, well-maintained swimming pools and ebullient
staff. Inside are 950 beds. Many of the structures here are like this
one, but the Royal Kenz stands out because of its location.

A year ago, right
next door at the Hotel Riu Imperial Marhaba, the terrorist Seifeddine
Rezgui Yacoubi pulled a Kalashnikov out of an umbrella and opened
fire, killing 38 people, all tourists, most of them British, before
he was overpowered.

Since then, a dark
cloud has hung over this stretch of coastline. Restaurants and small
entrepreneurs have given up and sun umbrellas rot on the beach. The
Royal Marhaba is sealed off by a fence topped with razor wire.

The livelihoods of
roughly 2 million Tunisians depend on tourism. The turmoil that
followed the Arab Spring was already keeping some foreigners away,
but it wasn't until the dual attacks in 2015 -- one in March in front
of the Bardo National Museum in Tunis and another in June on the
beach in Port El Kantaoui -- that revenues from tourism plummeted by
35 percent.

Who's to blame for
this situation? The politicians, says Ridha Jegham, because they're
the ones making people afraid. Jegham, 50, has an athletic build and
sports a crew cut. He's the manager of the Royal Kenz.

Jegham gives a tour
of his empty hotel. At a lonely bar sits a man named Mehdi, a hulking
security guard in a red polo shirt. From his perch, he watches over
the eight rows of beach recliners for guests of the Royal Kenz. Three
Russian families have claimed the first row, dragging the chairs from
the shade into the sun, right up to water. It's almost only Russians
who ever come here anymore. Tunisia became their destination of
choice over Egypt after the attack on a Russian passenger jet over
the Sinai desert.

The hotel personnel
would prefer the English; they're not as surly as the Russians. But
British tour operators are shunning the country, along with most
Belgians and Dutch. British airlines don't even fly into the area
anymore.

Contributing to
hotel manager Ridha Jegham's tragedy is also a great
misunderstanding. Jegham thought the tourists were like friends who
were coming for personal reasons. He believed there was something
akin to sincerity or loyalty in this business.

He says his country,
Tunisia, has emulated European ideals like no other country in the
region. Freedom, democracy, self-determination, responsibility --
born out of the Arab Spring revolution of 2011 and the free elections
that followed. He points out that there are satirical programs on TV
now, something that would have been unthinkable before. Attending
university is free, and education is just as compulsory for Tunisian
children as it is for those in German or France.

Jegham speaks with
an air of equal parts pride and bitterness. It's like he's saying: We
deserve better.

"We are
peaceful and liberal. We're modern," Jegham says. He doesn't
understand why the Europe that was once so eager to bask in the sun
on his beaches and take full advantage of the eternal North African
summer isn't showing more solidarity and sending its tourists.

The day began
wonderfully for Víctor Tatay, and it's only going to get better.
Tatay has been in a glorious mood since the beginning of the vacation
season. After all, he's doing what he does best: finding jobs for his
compatriots.

Tatay is the
director for the Valencia region at Spain's leading temporary
employment agency, Adecco. He's 35 with a neatly trimmed beard, dark
suit and a handkerchief sticking out of his breast pocket. He sits in
his office inside an Art Nouveau house in the bustling central
neighborhood of Valencia. As he gazes up at the ornate stucco
ceiling, he talks, offering one statistic after another.

He's been at Adecco
for 12 years and he likes the job. Twenty-five offices report to him,
from Castellón to the border with Andalusia, including 120 staffers.
He hopes to find jobs for most of the region's 450,000 unemployed
during the next three months of the summer season. The demand is
there, with the popular tourist destinations Denia, Benidorm and
Alicante urgently needing workers. All three locations are in Tatay's
area. He's an important figure for Spain at a very important time.

This country is the
most significant beneficiary of the shift in the tourism sector. Last
year, 68 million people poured into the country -- 22 million more
than Spain's entire population. By May 2016, 25 million tourists had
already visited, an 11 percent spike compared to the same period the
year before.

The onslaught has
been a blessing. When the financial crisis struck Spain, driving
savings banks to their knees and collapsing the country's
construction sector in 2008, millions of people lost their jobs. Six
million women and men were left without work during the worst of the
crisis and there are still close to 4 million in search of a job.

That's where Tatay
comes in: He's the man who feeds the industry as it calls for
laborers, the man who turns the unemployed into friendly
receptionists, waiters, cooks, maids or drivers. Tatay's people have
a special suitcase always at the ready for testing new candidates.
Inside it are a tray, silverware and a bottle. "The young man
must demonstrate that he can set a table, that he knows how to serve
dishes and pour wine."

Tatay looks at the
clock. Time to leave; he's got a busy day ahead of him.

Mohab Bakr, the
former general and security expert, turns on his computer and prints
out a military map. "Here," he points to the map, "that's
the Sinai, with an area of 61,000 square kilometers. And this up
here, in the right-hand corner, on the border with Gaza, that's the
really dangerous part. It's 800 square kilometers, max. Here on the
map it's about as big as my thumb. That's it!"

So is the Sinai not
actually dangerous? What about the terror attack in February 2014
that killed four people? And the bombing in Dahab that claimed the
lives of more than 20 people, including a boy from Germany? And
doesn't Islamic State have an offshoot it calls the "Province of
Sinai"?

Bakr says he can
appreciate "certain concerns tourists may have." But what
he cannot fathom is how his Egypt, his Sinai, are being put under
quarantine. Because airlines are no longer flying to Sharm el-Sheikh,
only one of the hotels in Taba Heights is still in operation.

"Did the German
Foreign Ministry issue travel warnings for France after the Paris
attacks?" Bakr asks indignantly. "Did anyone advise against
trips to Florida after the Orlando massacre? There's a double
standard in the West!"

Then Joachim
Schmitt, the vice president of the hotel group, finally arrives. Bakr
hurries to the lobby, where the meeting is starting. Bakr reports on
the cabling work being done on the 40 newly installed surveillance
cameras. Should monitoring be expanded? Schmitt dismisses the notion,
out of respect for the privacy of the guests.

But what more can we
do? Bakr reports on the positive experiences his team has had with
the bomb detector they recently acquired. It's a Russian model,
expensive but efficient. Schmitt approves of Bakr's suggestion to
replace bomb sniffing dogs at entrances with more detectors after
Bakr explains that machines don't need to take breaks. The investment
could pay off if guests start visiting the resort again in greater
numbers.

Schmitt looks at the
number of bookings. There are more reservations from Jordan, good. At
some point, he believes, the Russians will start coming back too. And
the Germans as well. He nods. Taba Heights should be prepared for
when things get better again.

On the website of
Germany's Foreign Ministry, the travel advisories for Egypt still
read: "Travel to the northern Sinai Peninsula and the
Egyptian-Israeli border region is strongly discouraged. This also
includes the Taba resort area."